Quote:
Originally Posted by BloodyButcher
Its against the nature of PA players to want to compete for anything.
Most would rather enjoy sitting a round without competing with other players attacking them.
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Is it any surprise, when defence is so tiring, I find myself yawning all the time just from getting up to send def at 4 am, and I havn't been attacked much or done any DCing this round. Courting incoming means wrecked nights, for pa players who are mostly no longer students able to sit up all night for defence. Inc avoidance for your own good health!
IMO all the political problems you describe stem from an imbalance between the effort required for defence and for attacking. If you attack you can prelaunch and go to bed at a sensible time, then get up at an ordinary hour in the morning, scan and calc. If you want to defend you have to get up in the early hours of the morning then devote all the time until breakfast and beyond sending smses to haul people online for their ships to fight off successive waves.
As a result of this imbalance of the activity required for defence and attack the ultra active, who can manage defence, and the troll tags, who dont bother, are favoured to the disadvantage of those in the middle. The ultra active category thrive in war but there are few of them. The troll tags would also thrive, but since they wont hold roids they are not in the end going to be competitive even if they had the numbers. The result is the vast majority have little incentive to fight long and hard wars.
You could (probably will) use this as an argument to say bigger tags are a good idea. That argument would say you have more people of average activity guarded by a small group of ultra active DCs. However, even the people willing to be DCs are not going to cheer for having a huge workload. Having to DC the wartime incs on 80 people would just be too much for most and lead to the DCs advocating war avoidance for the sake of their own sanity, or all seeking to join alliances with a higher proportion of DCs to ordinary members.
You say there are 'too few war tags left' in fact I dont think there has been any serious decline in war tags because for as long as i can remember all the best players have gravitated towards one or two tags. (perhaps to avoid DCing 60 moderately-actives!). Indeed the current competitiveness of three tags (BF, Ult and CT) is rather better than often is the case.
The solution is not going to be found in tag sizes, but in finding a way to make defence more tolerable for the average player, and less reliant on a DC system. The obvious possibilities I see are either the abolition of pre-launch altogether (in the hope of forcing attacks into the daytime) or super-improving the inc scan so that it reveals the land tick of waves on pre-launch (thus allowing pre-launch DCing in the late evening). If war thereby becomes less stressful and more enjoyable, you might get more of it.